How the Political Candidate Narcissistic Behaviors Inventory Was Created

The Political Candidate Narcissistic Behaviors Inventory was created by the following steps:

• The “Character Disorders” checklist by Kent Griffiths was used as a starting point under the fair use provisions of copyright law. Kent Griffiths has not authorized the use, was not involved in the creation of the PCNBI, and is not responsible for its contents.
• Items were eliminated if they required knowledge that a member of the public was unlikely to be able to obtain about a political candidate through publicly available sources (such as news articles), such as: the individual’s behavior in private;
• Items and characteristics were eliminated if they tend not to apply to people who choose to run for political office. For example, some narcissists have an unrealistically poor self-image, but those people usually don’t choose to run for political office.
• Items were selected and edited to focus on behaviors that might be displayed by a political candidate or an appointed or elected officeholder rather than behaviors that were specific to other roles.
• Items were adapted to provide useful differentiation among political candidates. For example, since candidates for political office commonly lie to one extent or another, the question about lying was adapted to read “Do they lie more frequently than other political candidates?“
• As much as possible, the survey was focused on externally observable behaviors rather than internal personality structure, while continuing to ensure that key aspects of narcissistic personality structure, character, and attitudes were captured.
• Multiple items were consolidated into single items to reduce the length of the list as much as possible while still capturing a broad selection of behaviors that narcissistic individuals, especially political candidates and officeholders, often engage in more frequently than normal individuals.
• Extreme narcissists tend to overlap with antisocial personalities in their personality attributes and behaviors, since there is a continuum from normal people to mildly narcissistic people to extreme narcissists to people with diagnosable narcissistic personality disorder to antisocial personalities to sociopaths. Accordingly, elements of antisocial behavior were incorporated to help differentiate extreme narcissists from mild ones.
• Published literature on narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder was reviewed as additional sources of items and for cross-validation.
• The list was revised to more closely follow elements of the narcissistic personality disorder definition from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th Edition. By definition all people with narcissistic personality disorder are narcissists, even though not all narcissists are diagnosable with narcissistic personality disorder. To be clear, this checklist cannot be used to diagnose narcissistic personality disorder or any other mental health condition.
• Major political scandals among elected and appointed officeholders and political candidates since 1970 were reviewed to identify behaviors that may have resulted from narcissistic personality structure, and the survey was reviewed to ensure that such behaviors were captured. Items and characteristics were removed if they seemed to have manifested only rarely in a publicly visible way.
• Items were edited for brevity, clarity, and simplicity of wording for a general audience.
• Language was edited to be as value-neutral and non-judgmental as possible.
• The survey was tested with laypeople to evaluate its ease of use and the extent to which a usefully distinct range of values were returned for candidates they evaluated.